The Shoemaker is on one level a brilliant and terrifying recreation of a crime that made headlines: the bizarre story of a man who embarked on a spree of burglary, rape and eventually murder. it also takes us on an extraordinary journey into the mind and soul of a psychotic. Kallinger was at once a poet and a murderer, a loving father and the killer of one of his own sons, a devoted husband and a vicious rapist, an dreamer and a man obsessed by nightmares of horror and destruction.